sense of the soldier.  All that they said was objective; one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing and not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree.  I think there is something in this of a sympathy between the English and the Moslems, which may have helped us in India and elsewhere.  For they mentioned many Moslem proverbs and traditions, lightly enough but not contemptuously, and in particular another of the proverbial prophecies about the term of Turkish power.  They said there was an old saying that the Turk would never depart until the Nile flowed through Palestine; and this at least was evidently a proverb of pride and security, like many such; as who should say until the sea is dry or the sun rises in the west.  And one of them smiled and made a small gesture as of attention.  And in the silence of that moonlit scene we heard the clanking of a pump.  The water from the Nile had been brought in pipes across the desert.

And I thought that the symbol was a sound one, apart from all vanities; for this is indeed the special sort of thing that Christendom can do, and that Islam by itself would hardly care to do.  I heard more afterwards of that water, which was eventually carried up the hills to Jerusalem, when I myself followed it thither; and all I heard bore testimony to this truth so far as it goes; the sense among the natives themselves of something magic in our machinery, and that in the main a white magic; the sense of all the more solid sort of social service that belongs rather to the West than to the East.  When the fountain first flowed in the Holy City in the mountains, and Father Waggett blessed it for the use of men, it is said that an old Arab standing by said, in the plain and powerful phraseology of his people:  “The Turks were here for five hundred years, and they never gave us a cup of cold water.”

I put first this minimum of truth about the validity of Western work because the same conversation swerved slowly, as it were, to the Eastern side.  These same men, who talked of all things as if they were chairs and tables, began to talk quite calmly of things more amazing than table-turning.  They were as wonderful as if the water had come there like the wind, without any pipes or pumps; or if Father Waggett had merely struck the rock like Moses.  They spoke of a solitary soldier at the end of a single telephone wire across the wastes, hearing of something that had that moment happened hundreds of miles away, and then coming upon a casual Bedouin who knew it already.  They spoke of the whole tribes moving and on the march, upon news that could only come a little later by the swiftest wires of the white man.  They offered no explanation of these things; they simply knew they were there, like the palm-trees and the moon.  They did not say it was “telepathy”; they lived much too close to realities for that.  That word, which will instantly leap to the lips of too many of my readers, strikes me as merely an evidence